Records desk / verification walkthrough
How to check a provider yourself, in five lookups
Every record this desk publishes is public, free and searchable by anyone. You do not need this site to check a provider, and you should not depend on it. Here are the five lookups, what each one can answer, and, more usefully, what each one cannot. About twenty minutes, no cost, no account.
Before you start, get one thing from the provider: its exact legal entity name, the name that will appear on the contract. Trading names, franchise names and website names frequently differ from the registered entity, and a search on the wrong name returns nothing and proves nothing. If a provider will not tell you the legal name on its own paperwork, stop there. That is already your answer.
1. The federal provider registry, NPPES
Go to the NPI Registry search. Choose the organisation search, enter the legal name and the state, and read the record: the national provider identifier, the practice location, and the taxonomy codes the organisation selected. For non-medical care at home the relevant taxonomy is 253Z00000X, In Home Supportive Care. A certified home health agency will usually show 251E00000X instead or as well.
Proves a federal registration exists, under a name and address you can compare against the paperwork you were given, with a taxonomy the organisation chose for itself.
Proves nothing about quality, competence, licensure, accreditation, insurance, bonding or background checks. There is no vetting behind an NPI. Nobody checks it, nobody inspects, and the number is not withdrawn when a business closes. Use it to confirm identity, never as a credential. A provider that presents its NPI as a qualification has told you something, and it is not the thing it meant to tell you.
2. The Missouri certified home health directory
Missouri's Department of Health and Senior Services publishes a directory of the providers it licenses and certifies, and the same records are downloadable from the state open data portal as Home Health In-State Certified Providers. Search the legal name. A listed agency will show a licence number and an expiry date. In the current file, 39 agencies list at least one St. Louis metro Missouri county as a service area.
Proves whether the provider holds a Missouri home health licence, what the number is, and when it expires. If you were told the provider is a licensed Missouri home health agency, this is where that claim is confirmed or refuted, in about thirty seconds.
Proves nothing at all about a provider of non-medical care at home, and its absence from this directory is not a finding. Missouri does not license personal care, companionship or homemaking, so those providers are not eligible for this directory and are correctly missing from it. Treating a non-listing as a warning sign here is the single most common mistake families make with this record. See the two-categories file.
3. The Illinois directory, if the care is in Illinois
Illinois is different, and if your relative is in the metro east this step matters more than any other. Under 210 ILCS 55, Illinois licenses non-medical home services agencies as well as clinical home health agencies. IDPH states in its own words that home services are not medical, and licenses them anyway. The department publishes a home services agency directory with a licence number and an expiry date per licensee.
Proves whether a provider of non-medical care at home in Illinois holds a current IDPH licence, and when it expires. On the Illinois side, unlike Missouri, a missing licence for this category is a real and serious finding rather than an expected one.
Proves nothing about work performed across the state line in Missouri, and an expired date is worth a direct question rather than a conclusion, since renewals and file updates do not always land on the same day.
4. The Missouri Secretary of State business registry
Search the entity name in the Missouri Secretary of State business search. You are checking three things: that the entity exists, that its status is good standing, and that the name matches the one on the contract you are being asked to sign, character for character.
Proves the legal entity is registered in Missouri, its formation date, its current standing and its registered agent. This is the step that catches the mismatch between a marketing name and the company that will actually hold your contract, and it is the cheapest protection on this page.
Proves nothing about the care. A company can be in perfect standing with the Secretary of State and be bad at this work, and a recently formed entity is not automatically a concern: good operators leave franchises and start new companies all the time. What matters is that the name on the registry and the name on the contract are the same name.
5. Medicare Care Compare, if certification is claimed
If a provider tells you it is Medicare-certified, that is a checkable claim. Certified home health agencies hold a CMS certification number and appear in Medicare Care Compare with their quality of patient care star rating and patient survey results. Search the name, confirm the certification number, and read the measure-level detail behind the star.
Proves Medicare certification, the certification number, the current star ratings and the underlying quality measures. If a provider claims certification and does not appear here under any spelling of its name, the claim is wrong and you should ask why it was made.
Proves nothing about non-medical hours. Medicare does not certify or pay for long-term personal care and homemaking on their own, so a certified agency's star rating does not extend to a separate non-medical service it may also sell you. Ask which entity and which service each line of your quote belongs to. This desk republishes the same ratings in the star ratings file, but Care Compare is the source and it is fresher.
What no registry can answer
The five lookups verify identity, category and licence status. They do not answer the questions that usually decide whether an arrangement works, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Ask the provider directly, and ask for the answers in writing:
Who exactly comes to the house, and what happens when that person is sick or leaves. How caregivers are screened, trained and supervised, and who a family calls at nine on a Sunday evening. Whether caregivers are employees or contractors, and who carries workers compensation and liability cover. What the rate is, what a minimum shift is, what holidays and mileage cost, and what notice is needed to change or cancel. What is written into the contract about ending it.
Then ask for references from families in a similar situation and actually call them. A record can tell you whether a provider is what it claims to be. Only people can tell you what it is like to work with, and no public file in Missouri or Illinois is a substitute for that call.
New Plan Care
New Plan Care pays to appear on this page. It is a client of this site's publisher, OwnersFirm. The correct thing to do with a paid placement is to put it through the same five lookups as anyone else, so run them: the business registry will show a Missouri limited liability company in good standing or it will not, and the certified home health directory will not list it, because it provides non-medical care at home and Missouri does not certify that category.
If a provider ever discourages you from checking, that is the answer to your question. Bring the same steps to every quote you collect.
Call New Plan Care at (314) 405-0887.
The five links, in one place
- NPPES NPI Registry, federal provider identifiers.
- Missouri DHSS home care provider directory, and the same data on data.mo.gov.
- Illinois DPH home services agencies, and the IDPH directory dataset.
- Missouri Secretary of State business search.
- Medicare Care Compare.
Missouri's licensing rules and statutes, if you want to read the underlying law, are collected on the DHSS laws and regulations page and in Chapter 197 RSMo. The Illinois equivalent is 77 Illinois Administrative Code 245. Medicaid-funded in-home services in Missouri run through MMAC provider enrolment, which is a contract rather than a licence.
This walkthrough describes how to verify a business against public records. It is not medical advice and not legal advice, and it does not tell you what kind of care a person needs.